March 3 - "Dress of White Silk"

“Dress of White Silk”
by Richard Matheson
I Am Legend (1995)

- (bleh) Supernatural

Granma has locked the young girl in her room after an unfortunate incident occurs during a play date.

I don’t honestly know what to think about this utter disaster of a story. It was written intentionally to represent the mind of either a small child or unintelligent monster, and instead succeeded in only irritating the reader. Stories written from these particular points of view can be done with stunning success (e.g. Sebold’s Lovely Bones, Keye’s Flowers for Algernon, and Gardner’s Grendel), but it is difficult. This tale proves the inherent difficulty in writing from such an unreliable and unintelligent point of view. It takes more than just sounding like a child, or monster. It takes understanding, and heart. Usually there is some piece – occasionally it is as small as a single sentence or idea – that rescues a story from total failure, but here there was not even that sweet mercy. I’m simply glad the story was no more than a few pages.